Ruminations from a jaded old guy

Menu

Category Archives: Uncategorized

The EROEI values for various electrical power plants are summarized in the figure. The fossil fuel power sources we’re most accustomed to have a high EROEI of about 30, well above the minimum requirement. Wind power at 16, and concentrating solar power (CSP, or solar thermal power) at 19, are lower, but the energy surplus is still sufficient, in principle, to sustain a developed industrial society. Biomass, and solar photovoltaic (at least in Germany), however, cannot. With an EROEI of only 3.9 and 3.5 respectively, these power sources cannot support with their energy alone both their own fabrication and the societal services we use energy for in a first world country.

Here is a prime example of fake (old) news. Primarily since the writer assumes that belief contains some news value. The writer talks about ‘massive implications’ and in so doing gives the matter at hand a value it doesn’t deserve.

Sure millions of people kill/maim/suppress others in the belief that is what they need to do get some reward from their imaginary friend.

But the ‘massive implications’ aren’t there. All those who after having been taken away their belief go on a rampage don’t do so because of the fact that their belief has been nullified.
They do so because they lose the only anchor their minds still have in this unfair, uncaring life. The only massive implication is that the world will be rid of that special kind of intolerance,hate and incomprehension of the basic laws of nature.

By discussing this really unimportant issue as if it is something of great weight the writer becomes part of the same belief system.

Not believing it is the same as believing it.

This scientist should really rethink his/her/genderneutral position and start to ignore this kind of belief because that is all it deserves.

Here he/she/it goes:

Did a man named Jesus from Nazareth exist in Judea around 2000 years ago proclaiming to be some kind of prophet? Of course this is a controversial question because of the massive implications for one of the world’s major religions. I do find it interesting to explore a basic factual question that is embedded in…

Short and sweet: This study is all based on self-reported (i.e., unreliable) diet and sleep data. I doubt the authors’ claim that the diet data have been “validated” and they admit that the sleep data are of unknown quality

This is the ultimate fact sheet for debunking what has become the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s most potent regulatory weapon — the claim that fine particulate matter (soot and dust called PM2.5) in outdoor air kills people. This sheet will be updated regularly as needed. This will be Version 1 (September 22, 2016). Please let me know if you have comments/suggestions.

<snip>

Transparent science conflicts with EPA’s secret science. The EPA’s claim that PM2.5 causes long-term death is grounded in two long-term epidemiologic studies, commonly referred to as the (1) Harvard Six-Cities Study [17] and the (2) “Pope” study [18]. Both studies are controversial for many methodological reasons. But the methodological controversies cannot be resolved because EPA refuses to release and/or refuses to compel release of the mortality data used in the studies to independent researchers for purposes of re-analysis and replication. For results to be considered to be scientifically credible, they must be capable of being independently replicated. In contrast, a large analysis of the recent daily air quality and daily death data from California for 2007-2010 reports no association between PM2.5 and death. [19] The data from the California study are available upon request from the researchers.

But haven’t EPA’s PM2.5 claims been validated by its independent science advisers? No. The group of independent science advisers formed to review EPA air quality science is the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC). In 1996, when the CASAC was actually mostly comprised of independent advisers, CASAC concluded that EPA had not shown that PM2.5caused death. While subsequent CASAC panels have ruled in EPA’s favor, these panels are almost exclusively comprised of researchers who receive hundreds of millions of dollars worth of research grants from EPA — and wind up passing judgment on their own work. These more recent CASAC panels can hardly be considered as independent of EPA. The nature of the PM2.5 science has not changed since 1996 — but composition of EPA’s “independent” panels has. [20]

What about claims that PM2.5 from indoor cooking kill people? The World Health Organization (WHO) claims that smoke from indoor cooking kills more than 4 million people die every year. [21] The studies used to support this claim depend entirely on the EPA’s claim that PM2.5 kills people. So the WHO’s claim is not supportable. While many individual researchers (not EPA-related) have attempted to examine whether indoor cooking increases deaths rates, they have so far not been able to link PM2.5 with death. [22]

Conclusion: PM2.5 does not kill anyone. The EPA’s claims of PM2.5 lethality rank among the most nonsensical, fraudulent and readily disprovable scientific claims ever.

Concluding Remarks

Beside all the methodological and conceptual problems reported here, a significant bias in evolutionary neuroscience is the particular place given to human brain and cognition. As stated by Deacon; “we are, after all, the ‘sapient’ ape, distinguished from all other species by our unusual mental powers. But this has also motivated the many preconceptions that we bring to the topic that affect both the selection of scientific evidence and our interpretations of it. The single most pervasive issue behind most of these preconceptions is the notion of human intellectual superiority” (Deacon, 1990a, original quotation marks). Under this view, it is the fact that the human brain is not at the top of a criterion that makes this criterion inadequate for determining intelligence, and conversely. The misconceptions that this approach has lead, even at the brain size level (see above), have a heuristic value and warn against considering this approach for more complex variables. This comment echoes Chittka et al. (2012) who, referring to an analysis that found human species to be the slowest in a color learning task, warned that although “there may be good reasons not to equate learning speed with intelligence […] the fact that humans do not top the chart should not be one of them.”

Finally, it is particularly striking to note [as Griffin (1976) did more than twenty-five years ago] that the subjective part of behavior, that is, the way animals experience the world, has been systematically put aside in comparative studies of animal behavior. As stated byShettleworth (2001): “it is possible, indeed usual, to study the ways in which animals acquire information about the world through their senses, process, retain and respond to it without making any commitment about the nature of their subjective experience or awareness.” Yet, what makes a bird or mammal flee danger is fear or pain, to search for food is hunger, what makes it look for mates is sexual arousal and for a place to sleep is fatigue, so that the subjective dimension of animal mind; consciousness, is the fundamental link between brain, cognition, and behavior. Studying animal brain and behavior without raising the question of how animals experience the world is likely to be as incomplete as was studying biology without evolution. In fact, this is one of evolutionary neuroscience’s principal challenges.